Solarpunks and companion animals

Or, learning to become their kahu.

There are two cats that live with me. I brought Louie home in 2019, and Nutmeg recently joined us in mid-November of this year. But I’ve wrestled, for the past few years and even before the arrival of Louie, with the concept of pet ownership, especially in the context of solarpunk values.

Cats can provide companionship, mental health benefits, entertainment, act to defend their humans, act as emotional support animals, and more. (I’m not saying all cats are like this: that would be like saying all humans are good at math as like, a base fact about our species. Untrue.) However, caring for a cat means that you could very well be subsidizing strip-mining, supporting industrial agriculture, buying tons of non-recyclable plastic in the form of toys, polyester beds, and litter boxes, the decimation of wildlife in your local ecosystem, not to mention all the carbon spewed into the atmosphere by shipping litter, toys, food, and other paraphernalia across the world to your doorstep. That’s difficult to reconcile. A lot of other people have written articles wrestling with this and I don’t really want to do an entire lit review, so just take my word on this. It’s hard.

What I want to talk about in this article though might be the toughest issue of all to tackle when it comes to pet ownership, though.

And that’s pet ownership.

Say you’re a solarpunk, or you think of yourself as acting pretty decent on the whole. You’re kind to the people around you, you’re caring to the animals in your life, you have concern for the environment and you paying loving attention to your ecosystem. You either don’t eat meat/animal byproducts or you wrestle/d a lot with how you were raised to consume other living beings, beings who demand our respect and valuation despite (or perhaps because of) not being human.

But you also are the owner of that other living being. Perhaps several. You violate their bodily autonomy on a regular basis. You decide when and what they get to eat, where they eliminate and the quality of their toilet, when and how you pay attention to them, or leave them alone, whether they get to access the outdoors or encounter other non-human animals, and more.

He would not last a day on the streets.

Maybe this doesn’t bother you at all! Maybe you’ve thought about it, but it’s really not the biggest issue in your life right now, so it’s easily dismissed. Or maybe you’re like me and constantly overthink every aspect of your own life, so you have been avoiding this truth by using phrases like “companion animal” or “cat parent” but not changing your behaviour in any fundamental way. Maybe you’ve thought about it and shrugged because hey, this is just the way things are, and at least Mr Kitty isn’t out on the street / in the pound / in a hoarding situation or slated to be euthanized.

It might be the way things are here. But not everywhere.

I want to propose a re-framing of western humans’ relationship to their pets. The ethical dilemma of pet ownership is one peculiar to a philosophical mindset that sees animals as less than humans, an unequal binary embedded into western (and many other) cultures for thousands of years,* in a very different light. To refute a binary, or work against it, is to re-invoke it, even if it is now on the other end of the moral horizon: instead of a neutral or good axiom, the animals=less-than mindset is now considered by most in our society to be an evil. But it still is. And so my thinking (and, I’d warrant, that of most readers of this article) operates within that mindset, carrying that framework of inequality forward. Using the language of “ownership” to describe humans’ relationship to their companion animal(s) assumes a subject-object relationship, or a hierarchical binary that positions all human animals as superior to non-human animals.

Instead of the baggage-laden term of “owner,” then, I propose we start to use “kahu” instead.

According to Wehewehe Wikiwiki, kahu is defined as: “n., Honored attendant, guardian, nurse, keeper of ʻunihipili bones, regent, keeper, administrator, warden, caretaker, master, mistress; pastor, minister, reverend, or preacher of a church; one who has a dog, cat, pig, or other pet. According to J. S. Emerson; 92:2, kahu ‘implies the most intimate and confidential relations between the god and its guardian or keeper, while the word kahuna suggests more of the professional relation of the priest to the community.’”

This fundamentally reorients the relationship into something that, while still describing a slightly hierarchical relationship, nonetheless acknowledges the equal footing on which human and non-humans stand and share. Importantly, kahu is a word describing someone who has humbled themselves to serve an other, one who may depend on this potentially symbiotic relationship. The Benjamin Project https://www.thebenjaminproject.ca/blog/kahu-hawaiian-word-one-what-has-a-pet uses the language of a “mutualistic relationship with a pet.” The pet may depend on the kahu for food, water, hygiene, and comfort, but the kahu may rely on the pet to provide mental wellbeing, amusement, and companionship: these are intangibles that are difficult to quantify, but exist and should be honoured nonetheless as factors that make for a fuller life experience.

I’m not saying this is the antidote to all the squishy feelings and ethical dilemmas spawned by living with a companion animal. As I pointed out above, it’s pretty easy to just use synonym words without internalizing the actual different meanings (subtle as they may be) so that they affect your behaviour going forward. You can use the language of kahu and not take on its posture. You can also just not care about this issue at all and go on living your life the way you were, I guess.

Yet I think using kahu can be a tool for many who struggle with their relationship to their companion animals. The fact is, they aren’t human and thus we cannot have a human-to-human relationship with them: they have different desires and needs, and for us to truly respect and value them for who they are, we need to acknowledge that reality. But neither are they things that we own. It was during the Enlightenment that the idea of the animal as mere machine came about (thanks, Réné Descartes), stripped of any mystery and classed as biologically inferior and thus it was no great evil to perpetrate against them. We are still using the philosophical framework developed in 17th-century France: that was over 400 years ago.

The transgressive boundary-crossing in this book (and all the vivisection) played well on Victorian fears of that subject-object line being crossed. Also miscegenation.

Maybe we should update things a little. As Christina and I discuss, cultural change isn’t some sort of sweeping revolution (most of the time); it consists in the roots of the grass, a swell of the ground, the small actions of individuals coming together to form a greater whole. Will changing our language change our relationships to reflect solarpunk values? I’d argue yes, but only if we want it to.

*For a more articulate elaboration of this, check out episode 3.2, “Thinking About How We Think About Animals, with Dr Chloe Taylor”.